Doing some work on a project the other day, I noticed that Geoffrey Perret’s very good book — Commander in Chief: How Truman, Johnson, and Bush Turned a Presidential Power into a Threat to America’s Future — is on sale in hardcover for a paltry $4.66, down from $27.00 at its release in 2007.
From my review for The American Conservative, where I’m a contributing editor:
I suspect that the title of Geoffrey Perret’s excellent new book was the work of his publisher. The reader will not find here an evaluation of the Constitution’s commander-in-chief clause, followed by example after relentless example of its expansion or distortion, or even a conclusion that wraps up the story and ties the experiences of these three presidents together.
Yet this book is none the worse for all that. This is a chronicle of half a century of presidential supremacy, told primarily through the presidencies of Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, and George W. Bush, that reads more like a novel than a dissertation. And although Perret obviously considers Bush the worst of the lot, the history this book imparts suggests that we’ve been through it all before—the recklessness, the stupidity, the bull-in-a-china-shop foreign policy….
All three men claimed religious inspiration for their major decisions. Truman, explains Perret, had been convinced since 1920 that “God intended the United States to break with its isolationist past and assume the leading role in maintaining world peace. The League of Nations project had foundered to Truman’s dismay, but with the end of the Second World War, he was certain that God’s plan for America could finally be put into action.” LBJ went much further, claiming that the Holy Ghost paid him visits: “He comes and speaks to me about two in the morning, when I have to give the word to the boys, and I get the word from God whether to bomb or not.” For his part, George W. Bush once told a friend, “I believe God wants me to be president.” “I’m driven with a mission from God,” Bush later said to the Palestinian foreign minister. “He told me, ‘George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan.’ And I did. And he told me, ‘George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq.’ And I did.”
Oddly enough, Perret only rarely draws explicit comparisons among his three principal subjects, but we can surmise from his narrative what he thinks they have in common. They involved their countries in dubious foreign conflicts impetuously, they carefully sheltered themselves from unwelcome news and analysis, and they risked the lives of Americans and foreigners alike in fits of pique, abandoning them to unwinnable wars out of fear of losing prestige or simply because they were too juvenile to admit a mistake. (“As a leader, you can never admit a mistake,” Bush 43 once said.) In this kind of war, Perret argues, “the president, along with the country, is likely to abandon its ideals. It finds itself killing for the sake of killing, killing rather than admitting a mistake, killing for revenge, killing for anything but justice.”
Check out the whole review, and take a look at the book.